How fast is your business growing? Hardware and software investments often stair-step their way up, as business growth compels first greater hardware purchases, and then more software, then more hardware, and so on. Sometimes, this leaves companies with excess unused IT capacity. The cloud may serve well those companies encountering fast or choppy or seasonal growth.

On the other hand, companies with stable, predictable revenue and growth patterns will usually feel more comfortable keeping systems in-house.

Where are the troops? The more spread out your business is, the more the cloud can help, especially across many time zones where 24-7 access is required.

Conversely, if your company is generally centralized and you don’t need 24-7 access, the cloud may not be for you.

How reliable must your system be? A system that’s 99.999% (“five nines”) up is therefore down only about 6 seconds per week. Mere 99% availability yields downtime of about 1 -3/4 hours per week. As McKinney notes, those three extra nine’s don’t come cheap – typically eight to ten times more than mere 99% uptime.

So be honest about how much uptime your system must really deliver. Remember too that overall reliability depends on the both the cloud vendor and the network provider. “Neither will race to claim ownership of your system,” notes McKinney.

Is the service secure enough? Know the regulatory requirements of your business and make sure the cloud vendor satisfies them. Some share their servers with other customers, a concern in regulated industries like banking and healthcare.

Good track record? There are lots of new cloud players, which is good news for choice, but “lots of new players and incessant innovation also invite stability,” says McKinney, and cloud vendors go out of business for all kinds of reasons.

The bottom line? Caveat emptor. If you’re looking to move a mission critical, line of business application into the cloud, be sure you can live with the results when that application is down or cannot be accessed. It happens more often than you’d think, even to the big guys. When’s the last time you heard in your office… “Oh, Internet’s down”?